Guest Author - Elsa Neal

Highly recommended

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is the classic guide to forging a healthy creative path. In addition to Cameron’s own spiritual and creative struggle, The Artist’s Way is based on the insight gained from teaching creativity classes for ten years.

Cameron, who is director Martin Scorsese’s former wife, has first hand experience of the problems often (sometimes unfairly) associated with a highly creative life: artist’s block, alcoholism, low self-esteem, and self-destructive attitude and behaviour.

Gradually, Cameron learnt – teaching herself and guiding others – how to write
without using alcohol as a crutch, how to give up the addiction she had to a
life filled with melodrama, suffering, and self-pity, and how to accept responsibility for using her own talents.

The Artist’s Way covers a twelve-week course, and introduces Cameron’s popular concepts of Morning Pages and Artist Dates. These are the staple exercises around which Cameron sculpts a new creative lifestyle based on self-knowledge, self-improvement, and self-nurturing. The Artist’s Way is practical and uplifting, and is less based in spirituality than some of Cameron’s later works.

I’ve worked through the full Artist’s Way procedure twice, and both times I found myself becoming a little bored with the concept towards the eleventh and twelfth weeks. Perhaps this is a good thing, however – the reader is nudged back to their own creative work, rather than wallowing in a self-help book. The decision to stop working on the course is made by the reader, rather than the book ending. It’s nice to think you have something to come back to when you want to take a “break” and do a stint of your own work. I also find it a great reference book for times when I need a warm up exercise or some motivation to move past a block.

I highly recommend The Artist’s Way for anyone who needs help working through block or getting started on a project, or looking for ideas and motivation to keep going. It makes a great gift, too.

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The Artist’s Way is available at Amazon.com

You may also enjoy The Nine Modern Day Muses: 10 Guides to Creative Inspiration for Artists, Poets, Lovers, and Other Mortals Wanting to Live a Dazzling Existence by Jill Baldwin Badonsky, available from Amazon.com